Quince Crosses the Chasm

In economics, there’s a class of goods where demand rises as price rises. These are referred to as Veblen goods, named after economist Thorstein Veblen who coined the phenomenon of “conspicuous consumption.” For certain products, the price is the product. An Hermès Birkin doesn’t cost upwards of $20K because of the leather. It retails for this price because costing $20K is the point. The scarcity and price aren’t bugs, but the entire feature set. This is why “affordable luxury” is an oxymoron. If you make it affordable, you destroy the very thing that makes it luxury.

Quince has challenged that assumption directly, defining the category of “affordable luxury.” Today, we’re proud to announce their Series E fundraise at a $10 billion valuation. 

Quince pioneered manufacturer-to-consumer: luxury-grade goods, sold direct from the source. Bestsellers include goods made with Mongolian cashmere, Italian leather, Mulberry silk, Turkish cotton and European linen. Quince ships directly from the factory floor to the customer’s doorstep, eliminating middlemen and brand markups. A near identical cashmere sweater retails for $300 at a department store and $50 on Quince because Quince has stripped out nearly every layer of cost between the raw material and consumer.

At 8VC, we invest primarily in enterprise technology, defense, and biotech. Consumer brands are rarely our focus. However, while the majority of investments we make seem thematic, our strongest investment principle by far is to back the ideas of the most talented entrepreneurs we know. We met Sid Gupta, the Quince cofounder, years before Quince was founded when he was running his last company Lolli & Pops. While we’ll admit we had previously never thought very much about the business of high-end candy, we were immediately blown away by the strategic depth, talent obsession and quiet tenacity obvious from our conversations. Before he even began his search, we knew we wanted to partner with him on whatever he built next.

After Lolli & Pops sold, Sid studied Wish.com, one of our portfolio companies that was an early competitor to Temu/Shein focused on dropshipping low-cost goods. Sid’s background in traditional luxury retail and study of Wish led to a thesis which was simple, contrarian and true: affordable luxury is not an oxymoron, but a supply chain problem that could be solved by the right team and technology. 

This current round coincides with a cultural turning point in the business. Quince has gone from a small company to an increasingly ubiquitous brand. Everyone is quietly sporting their Quince sweater or sleeping on their Egyptian Cotton sheets. We’ll explore what led us to initially gain conviction in Quince and why we believe it’s on a path to become one of the defining, scaled consumer businesses. 

The Wrong Kind of Luxury

There is a book we often reference called The Discipline of Market Leaders by Treacy and Wiersema. The core argument is simple and powerful: every market-leading company must choose one of three value disciplines as its organizing principle. You can pursue product leadership – being the most innovative, defining the frontier. You can pursue customer intimacy – the deepest relationships, the white-glove service. Or you can pursue operational excellence – delivering the best product at the lowest cost through relentless supply chain discipline.

The critical insight is that you must choose. You cannot excel at all three simultaneously. The culture, organizational structure and operating model required for each discipline are fundamentally incompatible. The “mediocrity trap” is trying to be average at everything instead of dominant at one. 

Every traditional luxury house has chosen product leadership, with a nod to customer intimacy. The value derives from the brand, exclusivity and design. The markup funds the dream. This is a perfectly valid discipline, which built LVMH into a $350 billion company.

Quince, however, chose an entirely different discipline. 

The Costco of Cashmere

Quince chose operational excellence. And once you see it through that lens, everything clicks.

In the early days, the focus was cashmere. Sid and his co-founders didn’t pitch us on building the next great luxury brand. They started by dissecting the cost of luxury goods and quickly learned it cannot be attributed to the quality. It was layers of middlemen: fiber processors, yarn spinners, knitting mills, brand headquarters, distributors, wholesale partners, retail storefronts – each extracting margin. And on top of it all, a brand tax that often multiplies the price again simply for the privilege of a logo. By the time a cashmere sweater reaches a department store shelf, it has been marked up five to ten times from its production cost. Sid’s vision was to cut out every one of these layers and deliver luxury products at the lowest price.

The company was originally called Last Brand, a name that perfectly captured the founding philosophy. The brand was no brand, but the product itself. It turns out consumers still wanted something to identify with. So, Last Brand became Quince, the identity crystallized around a simple promise: quality materials, honest prices, no brand tax. Ironically by rejecting the brand as a value proposition, Quince built one of the most powerful consumer brands. 

This is where the Costco analogy becomes apt. Costco doesn’t sell cheap products. It sells similar and often better products at lower prices, because its entire operating model is designed around procurement scale and distribution efficiency. The value discipline is operational excellence and the moat is scale. Costco became the largest buyer of organic produce in the United States not by design, but as a byproduct of scale. Offer products at conventional prices, demand follows, scale compounds. The flywheel is self-reinforcing.

Quince has unlocked a similar flywheel and nailed execution. It has built direct relationships with over 100 luxury manufacturers and a best-in-class technology platform managing supply chain and consumer operations end to end. As volume grows, cost per unit declines. As prices drop, demand grows and new products launch directly into a scaled customer base. The result sounds like a contradiction: improved quality and lower cost. However, players like Costco, Walmart, and IKEA have executed on a similar approach for decades. 

Quiet Luxury, Loud Growth

Like most generational companies, the journey required a bit of luck. 

When we invested, “affordable luxury” required explanation. The prevailing consumer ethos still equated luxury with logos and high price points.

Then, the culture shifted. “Quiet luxury,” or the aesthetic of understated, quality-first dressing, went from a niche sensibility to the dominant trend in fashion. Succession put Loro Piana baseball caps and unbranded cashmere on the cultural map. Consumers began to value the feel of the fabric over the logo on the label. Google searches for “quiet luxury” surged over 600% in a single year. The broader ethos shifted from “look at what I can afford” to “look at what I know.” Quince was perfectly positioned to ride this wave. 

The company has since expanded from cashmere into linen, silk, leather goods, bedding, home furnishings, fine jewelry, skincare, and even gourmet food and wine. The TAM is incredibly broad and constantly expanding. Each new category follows the same playbook: identify a product where the markup is egregious, go directly to one of the best factories, and offer it at a fraction of the price. In Geoffrey Moore’s framework, the $50 cashmere sweater was the beachhead to establish credibility amongst early adopters. Each new category benefits from the scale and infrastructure of the last. At this point, brand recognition has moved well beyond TikTok and Instagram, crossing into mainstream consciousness. Quince is no longer an early-adopter phenomenon, but a mass-market platform. 

Moats in Silicon Valley, and Elsewhere

But where is the moat? In Silicon Valley, moats almost always mean one of a few common attributes: the most technically sophisticated product, high switching costs, or network effects. These are powerful moats, but not the only ones, and arguably not the most durable. 

Scale is probably the oldest and most proven moat in business, predating the internet by centuries. It’s what built Standard Oil, Walmart, Costco, Amazon’s logistics empire, and the Hyperscaler Cloud businesses. It’s unglamorous and doesn’t demo well. But at sufficient volume, scale creates cost advantages that are nearly impossible to replicate. A new entrant can’t match your prices without your unit economics, and can’t get your unit economics without your volume. 

Quince had the early advantage of challenging incumbents with bloated margins. That alone was enough to find a strong PMF – even before reaching scale, prices were compelling. The early days were surprisingly efficient; the main constraint wasn’t demand, but inventory. The model was unproven, so building trust with manufacturing partners was a key priority.

Now, Quince has the purchasing power to demand the finest raw materials across a wide variety of categories at prices no startup nor luxury fashion house can match. Quince is the largest buyer of Class A cashmere in the world. A new competitor wanting to sell $50 cashmere would need to build the factory relationships, negotiate material costs, develop designs, and stand up the logistics and technology infrastructure, all before selling a single sweater as part of a thinner product catalog. The gap continues to grow between where Quince sits today and where any competitor would have to start.

Why Nobody Believed

For a long time, the investment was deeply contrarian. 

The Veblen paradox proved to be the most common objection. If luxury is fundamentally about exclusivity and price signaling, making it affordable by definition destroys the value proposition. 

But the more practical concern was that D2C was a graveyard. When writing the check, direct-to-consumer as a category had become almost radioactive in venture. Casper went from a $1.1 billion private valuation to a disastrous IPO at half that price, and eventually sold for parts. Allbirds would IPO at a $4 billion market cap and lose over 90% of its value. Brandless raised $300 million from SoftBank and shut down. Outdoor Voices, Glossier, Peloton – the body count was enormous. The consensus was clear: D2C was a distribution channel masquerading as a business model, and the economics didn’t work once Facebook ad costs tripled and Apple’s iOS privacy changes gutted digital targeting. Virtually no one in venture wanted to touch another consumer brand selling things online.

Both concerns missed the mark. Affordable luxury was a market that should exist but had not yet been exploited. And unlike the D2C brands that flamed out due to backwards unit economics, Quince was building something those companies never had: a tech-enabled supply chain moat grounded in scale. A luxury brand cannot cut its prices by 80% to match Quince without destroying brand equity. That asymmetry is the moat.

Crossing the Chasm

Most oxymorons stay oxymorons. Affordable luxury was supposed to be one of them. The economics of Veblen goods, a century of luxury brand-building, and the basic logic of conspicuous consumption all said it couldn’t be done.

Quince proved otherwise by choosing a different value discipline. Quince built a supply chain moat grounded in scale, from a decade of manufacturer relationships, and from one simple but radical premise: quality should not be a function of how many intermediaries stand between a factory and your doorstep. 

We are proud to have been one of the first investors in Quince. Watching this company grow from Last Brand into a $10 billion platform has been one of the great privileges of our careers as investors. The chasm has been crossed, yet we believe it’s still early. Every luxury category with a markup built on middlemen and brand tax – and there are many – is now in Quince's crosshairs.

Luxury has always been defined by exclusivity. Quince creates a new reality: luxury that is accessible to everyone.